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Ethereum holds Hoodi fork over smart contract gas risks
Core developers are keeping Glamsterdam off the Hoodi testnet until eight contract assumptions tied to two gas-pricing proposals are resolved.
Key takeaways
- Fork on hold. The Hoodi hard fork will not proceed until the identified smart contract concerns are addressed.
- Root cause. Two gas-accounting proposals could invalidate contracts that rely on fixed gas costs or on failed calls leaving too little gas.
- Call for review. Developers are asked to check on-chain contracts and off-chain systems such as wallets and relayers, and to report findings privately.
What happened
Ethereum core developers have decided not to activate the Glamsterdam upgrade on the Hoodi testnet until security questions around eight smart contract invariants are settled. The Ethereum Foundation disclosed the decision in a Friday blog post, following an October 13 analysis by smart contract auditor ChainSecurity.
According to the Foundation, the two proposals at the center of the issue, EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, alter how gas is charged for certain operations, particularly those involving the creation and access of blockchain state. Some existing projects were built on the expectation that specific operations would always cost a set amount of gas, and those assumptions would no longer hold.
ChainSecurity's review focused on contracts that keep executing after an external call fails. Under current rules, a failed operation can leave too little gas for later instructions to run, which some contracts rely on as a safeguard. The revised accounting could make previously unavailable gas accessible again, allowing a contract to record a permanent failure or otherwise behave in ways its authors did not intend.
The Foundation has published a GitHub repository documenting the eight affected invariants, with explanations, examples and guidance for developers to check their own code. Reports can be submitted privately to [email protected] ahead of the next All Core Developers discussions.
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